Elliott Carter (b. 1908) is now widely recognized as America's most eminent living composer.

This definitive volume of his essays and lectures - many previously unpublished or uncollected - shows his thinking and writing on music and associated issues developing in parallel with his career as a composer: his reputation became internationally established in the 1950s, and the material in this book offers an important and knowledgeable commentary on the course of American and European music in the succeeding decades.

Carter writes about his own music (in articles that are classic texts for all students of his compositional oeuvre), about new music in Europe and the United States, and about the relations between music and the other arts. Other pieces range from a consideration of aspects of music in general (such as time and rhythm as a philosophical problem) to the work of individual composers, such as Debussy, Ives, Varese, and Stravinsky, among numerous others.

As a whole, the collection is the expression of Carter's musical philosophy, and a valuable record for historians of modern music.